At our February meetup, Eoin Boylan and Suze Shardlow shared insights on how to stay close to developers and how to apply the 7 Ps of brilliant marketing practice to the dev rel.
Thanks so much to Contentful for their sponsorship of this meetup. Contentful offers an API first solution that enables you to create, manage and edit content on any digital channel.
Eoin Boylan, Head of Engineering, Evervault
Eoin Boylan shared the process his company, Evervault, put in place to deliver a more streamlined, relevant customer experience to developers. Evervault is a small company, but it punches above its weight in delivering security solutions.
Getting Close to Developers
When Evervault launched two encryption products, users couldn’t understand how to integrate the products. Eoin and his team realized that if they wanted to help these developers, they would need to sit closer to them – but how?
The Evervault team took inspiration from the Stripe Install model. Stripe’s Patrick Collison sat next to developers while they were integrating Stripe’s products, so they could flag problems as they happened.
The team began to meet developers in their co-work spaces, but the COVID pandemic put a stop to that. Helpdesk, email and live chat were hard to coordinate and introduced too much churn.
Slack Is The Answer
But the team were already communicating with developers on Slack, so they decided to take advantage of that platform. They created personalized Slack channels where developers could ask questions about issues they were experiencing. their issues.
Answering customer questions is now embedded in an Evervault engineer’s role. The engineers work in rotation, and will be on call to answer questions on Slack every 12-14 weeks. When a customer posts a question, it’s picked up straight away, and they’ll receive a solution within 10 minutes.
Suze Shardlow: Dev Rel Strategist
Suze Shardlow is an award-winning dev rel strategist with more than 20 years’ experience as a marketing professional. In her talk, Suze demonstrated how you can apply the 7 Ps of marketing to dev rel.
Here’s a flavor of the insights Suze shared for each P.
- Product – know your product and your market. Find out what products developers are using and ask them what they want from your product. Have your community test your products so you can sort out the glitches any you launch it.
- Price – developers can ensure that their products offer value for money. Also, measure how much it costs to use your products, especially the free version, so you can effectively measure cost against revenue.
- Place – Build a presence on the communities where you know your potential customers will be, and interact in a way that fits with that community’s culture. Be strategic about the meetups and conferences you go to. And make sure people know where they can buy your products.
- Promotion – this means showing by doing. Build an API in real time using your product, so people see how it works. And make sure your messaging is consistent, with both internal and external users.
- People – be intentional in choosing who will represent your brand, internally and externally. Make sure they understand your product messaging, so they can communicate it consistently.
- Process – customers invest in the experience, not just the process, so make sure the buying process is as painless as possible. Create a frictionless free trial, removing barriers so that people can sign up easily – and your company will gain revenue.
- Physical Evidence – this is about real-time user interaction with your products. Create high-quality content to educate users about the value of your products. This will generate word of mouth – the most powerful way to sell any product.
Takeaways
- Staying close to developers is the best way to build a product that developers will want to use.
- Marketing is your job too. You can tweak the principles of marketing to build great relationships with your customers and give them an excellent user experience.